This is part 2 of a series on questions you should ask about any electronic research source.  See part 1 of this series here.

2. What constitutes a RECORD?

What are the individual things the database consists of?

Some case law databases, like Saskatchewan Cases or the Canadian Abridgment, consist of summaries or digests. Others, like CanLII, consist of primary law – judgments and legislation. In others, such as the case law components of Quicklaw and WestlawNext, you can search a combination of summaries and full-text documents. Knowing if you are searching a short summary or full-text decision is …

Openings and closing of business correspondence, that is.

My father, an old-fashioned lawyer if there ever was one, once said there are only two ways to start and close a business letter: either Dear Sir/Yours faithfully or Dear Mr So-and-so/Yours truly, depending on one’s level of acquaintance with the recipient. (And not very truly: one is true or one is not, no more no less.)

There is a certain simplicity to that, and it can be made female-friendly without difficulty. My own views follow.

Beginnings
Younger folk appear to have this strange view that …

One difficulty with finding labour arbitration decisions is a lack of uniformity in the style of cause; sometimes the union’s name may be fully spelled out, other times it may be abbreviated, or it may be omitted altogether and the name of the griever used. As a result, it can be faster to find a decision by searching by arbitrator’s name and the dates rather than the party names.

CanLII, Quicklaw and WestlawNext all carry labour arbitration decisions, although their coverage varies. You can find them in the following databases:

CanLII

• Federal Labour Arbitration Awards (incomplete coverage from 1989 on)

It seems there is never a shortage of bad news going around. 2016 has certainly had its share. Brexit, the unexpected presidency of Donald Trump, corporate restructures, not to mention turbulent financial markets. Most people approach the New Year with excitement and hope. However, what happens after the first bit of bad news hits your world? Whether its job loss, health crisis or stock market volatility? How do you handle it? What can you do learn from, thrive and find opportunity in it?

In baseball you can only score points/runs by taking risks. Playing it safe is not progress. Progress …

Oh, so many of these – but I’ll mention just a few (for now).

Can not
No. It’s one word in modern English: cannot. And when you say it, the emphasis is generally on the first syllable.

Sometime
Spell-check thinks this always has to be one word. It doesn’t. As a single word, it means ‘former’: Bob Sharpe, sometime dean of law at U. of T., is now on the Ontario Court of Appeal. But Let’s have coffee some time and At some time in the future, we’ll see … (I acknowledge, however, that current usage may be against …

For many of us, getting and keeping client information and documents organized is a struggle.  Without a proper process in place, one generally ends up with piles, emails, notes and scraps of information all over the place – and by that I mean in both your physical office and on all your various devices and digital equipment.

Below I share with you 5 steps that anyone can take to get and keep each new client’s file, information and documents organized:

1. Create a client contact sheet.

A client contact sheet is exactly as it sounds – a sheet of paper …

Whenever you set out to use any electronic research source, be it a public web search or a specialized database, there are a few questions you should always ask – four to be exact. You may say there are really five or six important questions, or maybe you think there are only three, and that’s ok. But for me, not three but four is the magic number.

So here are my four questions you should always ask, with examples drawn from some of our favourite databases.

1. What is the SCOPE of the database?

Or what is its reach? How …

This week, you get a full colonic!

Sorry, couldn’t resist that.

Actually, full treatment of this subject is beyond the scope of a brief piece, but here are some basics.

The colon (:)
The colon is most frequently used to introduce a list of items, but it can often be omitted. There is no need for a colon in the following sentence:

The syndicate of lenders consists of: Bank of Montreal, Bank of Nova Scotia and TD.

The colon is correctly used after the word ‘sentence’ just before the example; it introduces what is to follow, where that doesn’t …

Conditional Formatting is a largely underused and undervalued feature in Excel. Very often I see people re-sort the entire spreadsheet or use the search feature to find specific values. These can be easily done instead with Conditional Formatting.

Ranking

Instead of re-sorting your spreadsheet, try selecting the data cells you wish to rank, then click “Conditional Formatting” on the command ribbon and select “Data Bars”. Hover your mouse over the fills and watch the data bars appearing on your spreadsheet where you can easily locate the high and low values.

Colour Scales

If you keep track of workflow, transactions, cashflow, …

In the past year, lawyers are reporting a more sophisticated kind of cybercrime: a hacker will gain access into a client’s email account and comb through the account to discover communications with the lawyer. The hacker will watch communications between the client and the lawyer until money finds its way into the lawyer’s trust account, such as when litigation is settled, a house is sold, or a corporate transaction is complete, the hacker will then pose as the client and send an email to the lawyer with instructions to redirect the funds into the hacker’s account.

In some cases the …